


Three Little Pigs on Passover

by MarkWShulkin



Category: Big Wolf on Campus, Three Little Pigs (Fairy Tale), emigration, faith in self, providence - Fandom
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-28
Updated: 2014-07-28
Packaged: 2018-02-10 17:43:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,450
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2034192
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MarkWShulkin/pseuds/MarkWShulkin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>the deeper meaning of this children's story has to do with faith in ones self</p>
            </blockquote>





	Three Little Pigs on Passover

My maternal grandfather was Yaakov Bellekerchevsky. - His name translates to Jacob from the County of White Church but it was Anglicized to Jake Weiss when he got off the boat in Philadelphia and the immigration officer asked him to spell it. He knew no English so he replied “Weisseh” which is Yiddish for the Russian word Belleker and the English word white. From then on he was just plain Jake Weiss.

 

When I was a toddler, in the early 1930’s, I loved his pinching each of my toes as he looked into my eyes reciting in Yiddish a story about” little piggies”, I didn’t know Yiddish and he didn’t know English but through a mid brain limbic resonance (whereby two mammals become attuned to each other’s inner states) we understood each other as if we were of a single mind.

 

His voice was exuberant as he firmly fingered my big toe and the third one but it seemed saddened as he gently touched the others while telling me their pig life experiences. I identified with the piglets and though I couldn’t verbalize my feelings as he touched each toe and spoke the line they went something like this:

 

Dieses klainer Schweinken ging auf den Markt.

(I was exalted that I’d be on my own,strong and independent some day )

Dieses klainer Schweinchen blieb zu Haim,

( It also felt comfortable being at home protected by family)

Dieses klainer Schweinchen hatte roast beef,

( Especially at mealtimes when all the family was together)

Dieses klainer Schweinchen hatte keine.

(How lucky not to be an orphan with no one to depend on}

Und dieses klainer Schweinchen ging „wee,wee, wee“, dem ganzen weg nach haim.

(and to be tearful about not having a home to go to)

 

But more about the piglets later.

 

Grandpa Weiss lived at our house while his beloved wife, my adoring grandmother, lived with her other daughter on another side of Milwaukee. Don’t ask me why they weren’t living together. It most likely had to do with economics, Not having skills in a trade or being fluent enough in English to be an administrator or a salesman. Jake Weiss wasn’t able to support his own household during the Depression. I suppose that neither son-in-law, perhaps needing to help his own parents, was willing or able to take in both of them..

 

If Grandpa Weiss was unhappy about the separation, he never complained about it. He was a religious man whose devotion to religion made his difficult life in America bearable. He scrupulously observed the Sabbath and the dietary laws, carefully separating dishes reserved for dairy products from those that were used for meat dishes. Somewhere in the Bible or the Torah it said that, “Thou shall not eat a kid in its mother’s milk“. Similarly on Passover he kept two similar sets of dishes that had never been exposed to bread.

 

It was on Passovers that he resumed his long lost role as the family patriarch. He conducted two hour pre dinner seders, not skipping a single word in the Hagadah in spite of the family’s vigorous cajoling that he shorten the service because they were hungry,.

 

He was a lonely man. He hadn’t made friends outside of the family nor had he much interest in doing so, If his aloofness was snobbery it was because he had been an aristocrat in the Old Country and he had brought the European custom of ranking people according to social class with him to America. His father and grandfather owned a flour mill on the Dniper River in Kaniev, a small town within the Pale 15 miles east of Kiev. In that setting he was considered wealthy and as such didn’t mingle with working class people. He was special in his family, an only son with five younger sisters. The sisters too didn’t mingle with outsiders and were close to each other and the family. That was expected under the Dowry system in which family money was kept within the family through arranged marriages with wealthy cousins. Things were very different in America but Grandpa’s limited knowledge of English kept him from assimilating.

 

My friendship with my Grandpa closened when I studied German in college, since it’s similar to Yiddish and I was better able to communicate with him. His pride and his sense of humor was brought home to me when I was accepted to medical school and he asked, if they taught Yiddish in medical school ?“ Hearing the answer, he quipped, What good is a doctor who doesn’t speak Yiddish!“

 

Grandpa died in his 90’s. I was studying psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh at the time and the Jewish tradition of burial within 24 hours didn’t allow me to get to his funeral. But when part of a course in Family Therapy required me to interview my mother to get the details of my own family history, I was lucky

to learn more about his life in the Old Country. He, himself never spoken of it, even when asked about it, because it brought back painful memories of religious persecution and of family left behind. At least that was what I concluded.

 

My mother told me that at the turn of the 19th century, the renegade monk, Rasputin, had convinced the Czar that the assassin of his predecessor had been a Jew. That started a three fold program designed to eliminate Jews from Russia.

   1.One third were to be exterminated

   2 One third were to be deported

   3.The other third converted to Christianity.

 

During, the government condoned pogroms that followed, the Cossacks burned down the Bellekerchevsky’s mill and they were no longer wealthy. Jake, leaving his wife, along with my mother and his son to live with his parents, emigrated to America where he’d heard that the streets were paved with gold. He planned to make money quickly there and to be able to send them steam ship tickets to join him in a short time. As it turned out he suffered the indignity (for him) of having to work as a junk peddler and was able to save very little. He lived alone for four years without much or any communication with his family before finally having the money to send for them.

 

I then understood more about the pigs.

 

„Dieses klainer Schweinken ging auf den Markt.

(Grandpa had gone to the United States alone not knowing English perhaps to be slaughtered)

Dieses klainer Schweinchen blieb zu Haim,

( He left his wife and children unprotected in hostile Russia)

Dieses klainer Schweinchen hatte roast beef,

( His wife and children joining him in america was a feast for all of them )

Dieses klainer Schweinchen hatte keine.

(but it was difficult for him to make a living)

Und dieses klainer Schweinchen ging „wee,wee, wee“, dem ganzen weg nach haim.

( and all of them were homesick for relatives back in their homeland)

 

Then Mother told me that she dearly loved a different story that Grandpa used to tell her after she joined him in Milwaukee.

 

It was about three pigs, who swore by their chinny chin chins, (their Jewish beards in Grandpa’s traditional religious beliefs}. The pigs built three houses of different materials. A wolf was able to blow down the first two pigs' houses, made of straw and wood respectively, but was unable to destroy the third pig's house which, was made of bricks.

 

I think he passed this story on to his descendants as his way of telling them that they have to have faith, in God or in themselves

in order to persevere through hardship. The pig who made a house of straw was weak in faith and easily succumbed to the wolf at his door. The pig whose house was made of wood had stronger faith but not enough. Only the brick housed pig of very strong faith was able to overcome the wolf.

 

In telling his stories Jake gifted his children and grandchildren a character trait that will be passed to future generations. At Passover times when my children were small after I retold the story of the Exodus from Egypt as a metaphor for the escape from Russia, survival from the Holocaust, and Israel’s struggle for existence, I’d suggest the solution to personal problems is having faith in either Providence or in oneself. Then I expressed my gratitude to our immigrant ancestors for their courageous personal sacrifices for our benefit. I tell them specifically about Grandpa Weiss’s stories and we all join hands and sing,

 

“Who's afraid of the big bad wolf

The big bad wolf

The big bad wolf

Who is afraid of the big bad wolf

Tra la la la la”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
